Old Music Heard a New Way

 After a stroke, my dad started using the phrase, “that was the best…  I ever had, or, I’ve never …” While his certaintude made me smile, it also gave me hope that maybe a brain blown, didn’t have to be a complete calamity. Finding new joy in old things sounded okay. While watching Tick Tick Boom last night, I wondered why I didn’t share the love of theater that many friends have. Reading the memories and hearing soundbites of lyrics by Stephen Sondheim after his death and learning he inspired Jonathan Larson who wrote the lyrics and score for Tick Tick and Rent, challenged that thought more.

Lately, I’ve found myself listening to different radio stations when I drive. WXRT for one. I realized I liked it when I was painting a portrait at the Palette & Chisel. It was in the background, but for me background sound is often front and center and I can’t not hear it. The sniffle in a Zoom program, the voice on the other end of a cell call in a hardware store with Silent Night playing, talking about the disappointment in a center piece at Thanksgiving, for instance. Painting usually puts me into a zone where pretty much I have virtual blinders and noise cancelling earmuffs, but that morning up on the third floor with the north light, I found myself making brushstrokes to Peter Gabriel’s Your Eyes and liked the results. Not in the painting but in the feeling that I wasn’t second guessing my strokes, the music nudged a rhythm. I wondered why I didn’t listen to XRT back in the days of a beer after work that accompanied conversations of bands I’d never heard of, that now are oldies.

Once home, I asked Alexa to play XRT. During my visit to Seattle, we listened to KMHD, a Portland jazz station. I’ve never heard so much xylophone or saxophone… and liked it. Alexa has been playing that too. As far as I know, I haven’t had a stroke, but something has happened to nudge me from a rut I didn’t know I was navigating. I feel less hunkered down, like I could tap into courage to do something else new… something bigger than a radio station. Move? Take a long trip alone. Write a novel? Create some other adventure. Now, I wonder if it really was the stroke that caused my dad’s reframing his experience of the world. He may have just heard old music in a new way.